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Mad Skills: MIDI and Music Technology in the Twentieth Century

by: Ryan Diduck

£4.00 – £5.50

Part rigorous history, part insightful commentary, and part memoir, Mad Skills tells the story behind MIDI, through the twentieth century’s kaleidoscopic lens.

Guiding us across one hundred years of musical instruments, and the music made with them, it recounts the technical and creative innovations that led to the making of the most vital, long-standing, ubiquitous, and yet invisible music technology of our time.

by: Ryan Diduck

SKU N/A Categories Cultural Studies, Music
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Author

  • Ryan Diduck

    Ryan Alexander Diduck is an author, scholar, lecturer and critic. His 2015 doctoral dissertation, “Global Controller”, was the first cultural history of MIDI — the Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Diduck’s writing has appeared in The Wire, The Quietus and Fact Magazine. He lives in Montréal.

Book info

Paperback with free eBook9781910924761
EBook9781910924778
Number of pages238
Publication date15/03/2018

Reviews

Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania and Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture

“Most people have no idea what MIDI is, even though it undergirds and regulates a substantial swathe of the sounds they listen to and love. In Ryan Alexander Diduck’s deeply researched telling — a biography of a technology, with a caustic critical edge — MIDI takes on a personality of its own even as it standardizes global music production to a hitherto unimaginable degree. Blending technical knowledge, business history, and cultural polemic, Mad Skills is a sharp study of a human invention that stamped its post-human character over an entire era of pop.”

Benjamin Tausig, Assistant Professor, Ethnomusicology, Stony Brook University

“Mad Skills is a history of electronic music technology, of scraps over standards, and of music’s relationship to capital in the twentieth century. Through deep dives into archives, original interviews, and an aptitude for the Marxian archaeology of electronics, Diduck opens the black box of MIDI for all to see and hear.”

Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never

“A deep, clear read on the historical and social development of machine music; wisdom about MIDI finally.”

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